Is the Rock toast? Sun reportedly nuking high-end server CPU

Here's a shocker (not): a new report from the New York Times says that Sun is canceling Rock, its forthcoming high-end server chip. Ashlee Vance, who generally has solid sources at Sun, claims that after five years in development, Rock has met an "unceremonious end." (Actually, I'm not sure I believe this. I bet there was at least a little ceremony, like maybe a few engineers sharing a moment as they took down a breakroom poster of Dwayne Johnson that had clever cartoon speech bubbles glued to it.)

I hate to be so flippant about it, because the cancellation of a project of this size and ambition level is heartbreaking to all of the engineers who wanted to see their efforts validated. But, as I mentioned in my coverage of the early 2008 ISSCC session where Marc Tremblay, who has left Sun for Microsoft, introduced the chip's novel approach to performance, I wasn't really sold on it.

I have a vague sense that if there's "solution" to the problem of parallelism, then it involves some radical rearrangement of the relationship between execution resources and memory, and I just don't think that throwing register file space at the problem is the answer.

Ultimately, I suspect that this anonymous poster at RealWorldTech has it right when he suggests that Rock's run-ahead, speculative execution approach was never able to deliver the kinds of speedups that its designers were hoping for across enough workload types. Or maybe there was a major bottleneck somewhere else, like socket bandwidth, that prevented the chip from getting anywhere near its theoretical peak performance. Or, alternatively, anonymous and I could both be wrong, and Sun's Rock engineers could be throwing away some revolutionary hardware simply because their company ran out of time and money and got bought by a software giant.

Either way, the decision to throw Rock overboard is a decision that the future of Sun's hardware lies in the commodity side of the business. Once Sun is fully ingested into Oracle, I can't imagine that the SPARC line will have a long-term future. Oracle is one of the few large software companies whose main product supports multiple ISAs, but I would bet that they'd love to see their list shrink. I can easily imagine that a few years out, SPARC will be a legacy ISA for Oracle, and the company will focus on x86-64, POWER, and Itanium (assuming the latter is still with us).